“(ask the MSM)…why Michael Connell’s death is not has suspicious as Vince Foster’s…”

New Years, 00. I was haunted by November and I have no idea if Michael Connell had something to do with it. But it doesn’t matter if he did or not. As far as being haunted…

We all know why.

New Years, 04. I was haunted by November, and Michael Connell may well have had something to do with it.

Why did I feel haunted?

My wife and I were at a Kerry election night “celebration,” Nashville, TN in November. Why both candidates create something resembling a high class frat party when one always turns into a funeral, I’ll never quite understand. They could at least have alternate plans to change it into a New Orleans type funeral. Now that would be going out with class.

About 8:30 Central, things had been going fairly well, and suddenly the numbers on the board started going screwy. I told my wife, “It’s like someone pulled a switch.” The local Kerry phone bank head had just met us in a hallway and acted rather nice, another “switch,” since she had stopped talking to me. A couple of months earlier I had mentioned I had a lot of information in E-mail accounts about vote rigging, and if she wanted, I could E-mail her a couple things I had just to see what she thought.

Her response?

Basically, “Shut the hell up, I don’t want to even know, now get back to your phone.” Then she stopped talking to me and acted haughty towards me until election night.

And we wonder why Dems kept losing?

Remember that time; about 8:30 Central: 9:30 Eastern.

Michael Connell’s recent plane crash has brought up an old wound. At 9:30, Eastern, 2004… Republicans funneled votes through a server in Tennessee, the lawsuit that Connell was supposed to testify in after being warned several times not to fly due to possible sabotage says. The claim: votes were switched; Kerry to Bush. Connell had agreed to testify concerning this. That was the approximate time I said, “It’s as if someone threw a switch…”

Spooky.

Inspection- Questioning, Yet Hoping, for More “New” in the New Year: 09

That’s right! Now ‘new and improved!’ Here it is, old man time, now reformulated: born again. Washes cleaner, brighter, younger, filled with more intelligence… though maybe not ‘whiter.’ You need it now. Right now!”

These people haven’t figured it out yet, but they lost the last two election cycles for a reason: they are WRONG, and have been.

Monday, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell announced that he intends to block President Obama’s stimulus bill without ever seeing it.

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it.”

He wants to bog this entire process down by sending everything through different committees, and spending months, if not years haggling back and forth on it. He also wants to tie in tax breaks for the ultra-rich into any spending bill because Republicans are still convinced that the only way to stimulate the economy is from the top down.

The actual goal of the Republicans is to continue to try and box the Democrats in by threatening filibusters. They are playing this huge game of chicken and their plan is to wait until the mid-term elections in hope that the electorate will feel the Democrats have failed.

I say, let’s just do away with the filibuster. If the Democrats aren’t going to force the Republicans to actually camp out in the Senate and continually jabber on until they are exhausted, then maybe we don’t need it at all. The spirit of the filibuster wasn’t to cave in at the mere threat of one, — the burden is on the person making the threat to carry through on that threat. Harry Reid needs to either grow a HUGE set of balls right now or step aside and let someone else take over the Majority Leader position.

Going along to get along is only useful if you are in the minority. I kinda understand the reason for being timid during the 2007-2008 term because the majority margin was paper-thin. But it is not so thin now. We have an almost sixty percent majority in the Senate now. If a party wants to “go along” then that should be the minority party. Either get in involved or get out of the way. But if they are going to do nothing but block important key legislation simply because they want to be spoilers, then lock them out altogether. Take away the filibuster, or limit it to having only one active filibuster at a time.

As far as McConnell’s statement about whether taxpayers deserve to know about where the money for the stimulus bill is going to be spent, Hale “Bonddad” Stewart has the appropriate response to McConnell and other Republican Idiots who would stand in the way:

“Let me get this straight. A Senator who oversaw one of the largest expansions in government spending in history is now concerned about spending? According to the CBO, total government outlays under Bush and the Republican controlled Congress from 2001 -2006 increased from $1.8 trillion to $2.4 trillion — that’s an increase of 33%. At the same time — again under Republican rule from 2001 to 2006 — the total debt outstanding increased from $5,807,463,412,200.06 at the end of fiscal 2001 to $8,506,973,899,215.23. And now a man who helped to oversee this is complaining about spending? Excuse me?”

McConnell was also one of the strongest supporters of the Wall St. bailout and the biggest opponent of the Big 3 bailout, being the one who put the kibosh on the done deal that was hammered out by all the other parties involved. So the only question that remains really is, “Why does Mitch McConnell hate the working class?”

Is Illinois’ F**king Golden Boy Merely the Stooge for a Partisan GOP Attack on Obama and the Dems?

Had Enough Leading Questions Already?

While some may choose others such as Billo, Hannity, the Savage Wiener or Radio’s Anal Cyst Rush — as a reliable weathervane of what not to believe, I have my own preference second-tier CNN newsreader Kyra Phillips. In the case of the first four names, we know they are regurgitating their daily Talking Points from the Ministry of DoublePlusGood Neocon Truth, but Kyra aspires to a level of journalistic integrity that renders her eructations of state-sanctioned Big Media hooey more entertaining and she’s easier on the eyes and ears than the Cave Boys.

I first noticed Kyra’s particular talent in this regard back in May of 2003, following Junior’s Commander-Cody-with-a-Codpiece moment on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and his hilariously boneheaded ‘Mission Accomplished’ ramblings afterward that ‘major combat operations’ had been completed in Iraq.

The Most Trusted Name in Newspeak had Kyra onboard the carrier that day and, with time to fill and a Glorious Victory in Eastasia to celebrate, she was given a free ride on a US Navy jet at the taxpayers’ expense. After landing, the breathless and excited Ms. Phillips gushed — only verbally, as far as I know — over the sea-going military, jet pilots, aircraft carriers and the whole goddamned Good War thingie we had kicked Iraqi behind and all was right-wing with the world! But I noticed something in Kyra’s flushed smiling face and twittering-with-glee voice why, it reminded me of a time decades before when I ran into a notorious groupie just hours after she had ‘balled’ (late ’60s slang term for copulation) every member of her favorite band! Of course, the video of Bush’s dumb publicity stunt is only useful now as a platform to launch a thousand jokes, and I’m sure Kyra’s embarrassing orgiastic spurt of militaristic slathering, wearing a flight helmet, no less, has been filed in the root cellar at CNN never to be seen again.

In the years since, whenever Kyra decides to editorialize the news, whether it be Rudy Giuliani’s popularity with Dixie-Fried Republicans, Fred Thompson’s manly irresistibility to voters, or Sarah Palin guaranteeing a big McCain win with the womenfolk, I have sure knowledge that whichever way Kyra blows, so to speak, the opposite is true.

This came up again a few weeks ago as the news of Scooter Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s December 9th arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich blanketed the airwaves like an all-day Chicago blizzard. There was Kyra, frowning eyebrows crawling toward one another, serious-minded caterpillars an omen of the bad news to come, hyperventilating that the Blago scandal was “ten times worse than Watergate,” an attitude likely shared by some of her second-string Big Media cable colleagues but not expressed in so grandiose and historic a phrase.

Really, Kyra, ‘ten times worse than Watergate’? Hint to Phillips’ fevered brainpan: Blago didn’t have a private ‘Plumbers’ force breaking into his political opponents’ offices, he didn’t suborn perjury, he didn’t claim executive privilege to protect himself, he didn’t have a slush fund with millions of dollars in it to pay off criminals in his employ, and any scandals he’s alleged to be involved in are fairly pedestrian examples of political corruption and not a Constitutional crisis for the nation.

Perhaps she was taking her cue from Fitzgerald, who buzzed that Blago was on a “crime spree.” Whoa! Al Capone went on ‘crime sprees’ such as the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Blago’s babbling about wringing cash out of various politicians and bigwigs comes nowhere near that level of violent wrongdoing.

Whatever Blago’s crimes, no one died, no one was injured, he didn’t start any unnecessary wars based on lies, he didn’t authorize torture or the waste of billions of dollars in taxpayer money through no-bid contracts, he didn’t order Ken Blackwell to finagle the Ohio vote in 2004 to shoehorn Junior back into the presidency, he didn’t conspire to steal an election and jail the winner, as in the Don Siegelman case in Alabama, all of which seem to me to be much more serious than these routine instances of alleged malfeasance by Blagojevich.

But there’s more to this story than has been unearthed by the corporate BM, using the telescope from the wrong end, as usual.

Here are a few facts that have been missed in the rush to convict Blago:

The guy in the Jesus suit
occupied space at the end of the bar
exuding waves of beneficence
and winey fumes
to all and sundry.

The suit fit comfortably,
38 Regular, relaxed-fit pleat pants,
with a seven-and-a-quarter halo
on the side.
He muttered of Old Testament doom
and it wasn’t even Sunday.

“I’m only here to fulfill prophecy,”
he remarked to the bartender,
who was taking his money from the bar.
On the jukebox Bing began to croon
‘White Christmas’ and Jesus started to say,

“I’m very disappointed in you all,”
he turned to me and glared,
“As usual, you people just got it all wrong:
I was actually born in June,
and died at the end of May.”

“I was a Jew preaching to Jews,
and so were all twelve original Apostles,
and then along comes Paul,
who was something of a loon,
and gives to the Gentiles a way

“to get into heaven.
Hey, the only person I said was saved
was a thief hanging next to me,
sometime before noon,
on my crucifixion day.

“And you can’t even follow
the few simple words,
that I spoke in the Sermon on the Mount,
instead you fight about theological trivia
and spread horrifying gloom
and tell people there’ll be hell to pay,

This is the second in the series of Inspection columns inspired by Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianites. His body: a metaphor for how little others have understood who he really was before and after, crucifixion.

As the body twitched and quivered into the arms of Death; animals approached. They ripped out legs, broke off arms. Scratching out eyes with claws, others attempted to shred and plunge their way into his body so they might eat his heart. Yet for each body part taken another grew. Despite this amazing regenerative ability, the body was still a body; risen or not… nothing more: a mere vehicle for the man, the prophet, the “Savior.” To this day they still fight over his carcass, regardless of the obvious, “He is not here.”

As the years passed some animals were killed off by others, but there were always thrice fold to replace them. If their goal was to become the sole source for divining his message: they failed, for others will always understand his message in their own way.